An Obsession with "Little": Children and Teen's Costumes in Ballet (Part 1)

Why do we care more about costumes than kids? Why is ballet so obsessed with the idea of being "little"?

Today’s the day: you are seven, or maybe nine, and it's audition day for ‘The Nutcracker’. A bright morning in August that sparkles of possibility… or doom. Donning your academy leotard, usually black, usually spaghetti strapped, with the classic pink tights and shoes. You are probably wearing leather shoes because you are young, and have not yet discovered the majesty of canvas shoes. Your hair is done with more precision than normal, your wispies, as your ballet teachers call them, are smoothed back by a lot of hairspray and your mother’s hands. Perfect.

Her hands on your shoulders, you approach the registration table, grasping papers signed by her, granting them permission to watch and judge your dancing and acting for the next few hours. When it is time for your height to be measured you stand up nice and tall if you are seven, and you try to shrink down if you are nine. You are assigned a number based on your height, and please, it better be a good number, like a multiple of five.

When casting children for professional performances, the first thing companies are looking at is height and size. This is because all costumes are preexisting and all dancers must be cast to fit the costumes. This feels okay at first, because no company is going to build new costumes every season custom to each child dancer; it would cost too much money. Custom costumes are rare in the ballet world, and would seldom happen for the unpaid child dancers of the company. However, when you take a step back from thinking about profit and cost and instead think about the environment young dancers are being placed in, there is much room for improvement. 

When auditioning for ballets at the professional company in which I was a student at, my best friends suddenly became my largest competitors. My body became something I was racing against. The complication of our growing, changing, and differing bodies became a source of tension. I tried to wish away growing in all capacities. I found myself jealous of the girls who were shorter and continued to get more desirable roles while I grew out of them. Or even jealous of the taller dancers who could graduate to the better roles. 

During the Pandemic in 2020, all Nutcracker performances were canceled due to the spread of the virus, and by 2021, ballet companies were attempting to get creative with the ways they could continue this long standing tradition (or, their biggest money maker). Companies were forced to bar children twelve and under from participating in the Nutcracker due to the vaccine rollout. Therefore, there was a complete overhaul on costumes, height requirements, and age requirements. All dancers were over twelve, and naturally were taller and larger and would therefore need different and new costumes. 

By 2022, with the vaccines available to children twelve and under, they were allowed to return to the ballet stage. Gia Kourlas, dance critic for the New York Times, wrote a piece about the noble return of children under twelve to New York City Ballet’s (NYCB) Nutcracker in The Tiny Dancers Who Make ‘The Nutcracker’ Sparkle. The subheading of the article states, “In New York City Ballet’s production this year, the children, most of them new to the show, are back to normal. Pint-size, that is.”

What is a normal size for a child? The article grossly praises the littlest of dancers not for their preciousness of youth or their sparkling stage presence, but for their actual small size. Though it is clear at some points Kourlas uses little and small synonymously with youthfulness, the rhetoric of her article is harmful as it places the small physical size as the most important aspect of a young dancer’s participation. Kourlas writes, “This year, rejoice! The tiny bodies are back.” 

Dena Abergel, NYCB’s Children’s Repertory Director in said that if Marie, the leading girl in The Nutcracker, got COVID-19, they couldn’t use the dancer who was Marie last year, “That Marie from last year is my height, so that’s no longer an option,” (Kourlas). Abergel is not even 5 feet seven inches. God forbid a growing child could be 5 feet seven inches in a fantasy ballet. Many Marie’s or Clara’s (the names change depending on the version of The Nutcracker you see) are played by adult women, in which sometimes she is meant to be a bit older, or sometimes meant to be portraying a young girl. Either way it is fiction, and there are young girls in the world of every height; some are under five feet tall, others can be five nine. Marie/Clara’s age is not definitive, why should her height be? Since when does age have a required height or weight? Why do we perceive certain sizes and heights as more acceptable for children? The Nutcracker is supposed to be fun. Instead, we are placing children into environments where they are hyper-conscious of their bodies, and are being praised for being ‘tiny’, and punished for being taller or bigger.

I cannot pretend to know what it is like to not be cast as a young girl in The Nutcracker because I was told I was too fat. I have been too tall, and by the time I hit puberty, I was “too large” in places compared to my classmates, I have been simply not cast for whatever reason the casting group kept to themselves. This is, of course, with the understanding that there is no too large in ballet, just an institution that is fatphobic and centered around whiteness and therefore attempts to delegitimize any dancer who does not fit into this mold. I have squeezed into enough costumes in my day that didn’t fit me, and have felt the frustrated grunts and breathing of costume fitters as they angrily fit me into tutus. But I have not been flat out told “no” to a role because of my body, at least not to my face. I want to leave space for dancers who as young children faced this bodily discrimination head-on and were faced with the ugliness of ballet bodily constraints via rejection and were left without an onstage Nutcracker experience. 

Seeing young children on stage is magic. Being a young dancer on stage, especially in The Nutcracker, is pure magic. It is nauseating to think about children who were not given a chance because of their height, because of their size. That magic is there no matter how ‘tiny’ the body. All children deserve to have costumes that fit them and not to instead be cast for a costume. 

This conversation will be continued in the context of being a teenager, going through puberty, and costume fittings in part 2!